


Forged by Firelight

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Camping, Firelight, Gen, Knight and Squire - Freeform, New Beginnings, beginning of a new relationship, mentoring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 00:08:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15473121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Owen and Wyldon forge their relationship by firelight. Set during Squire after Wyldon takes Owen as his squire.





	Forged by Firelight

Forged by Firelight

“That bacon looks cooked enough, squire.” Wyldon peered across the roaring red campfire that blazed in stark contrast to the white snow drifts lining the road through the Royal Forest to Cavall. The smell of smoking pork assaulted his nostrils, and he praised Mithros for the small mercy that he had finished eating his own bacon before Owen had overcooked his meat. “Unless of course you prefer your bacon charcoaled to guarantee that it’s truly dead.” 

Owen, who had been uncharacteristically quiet around Wyldon ever since his initial burst of enthusiastic assent when Wyldon asked him to be his squire, started as if Wyldon had snapped rather than offered a wry observation. Not for the first time since Owen had agreed to serve as his squire, he wished that he hadn’t been Owen’s training master since their prior relationship seemed to complicate what was always an uneasy period of adjustment when a knight took on a new squire. With his previous squires, he’d an intimidating reputation of severity, but they hadn’t known him first and foremost as a distant, disapproving training master. A training master couldn’t be as close to his pages as a knightmaster could to his squire. After all, a training master’s focus was forever divided between dozens of lads whose chief delight in life was the propagation of mischief. 

“Yes, my lord.” Owen jerked his bacon-speared stick out of the flames to realize that the meat was indeed overcooked, scorched to a crisp and beyond. “I mean, no, my lord, I don’t prefer my bacon charcoaled, but, yes, it’s cooked enough.” 

“You’re babbling, Jesslaw.” Wyldon thought there had never been a boy in Tortallan history so prone to rambling and putting his foot in his mouth as Owen of Jesslaw. Yet somehow the idea tickled him as much as it irked him. It had been fifteen long years since he’d a squire to amuse him whether by intention or accident. He’d forgotten that aspect of mentoring a squire when Mindelan—playing the matchmaking female—had suggested that he consider inviting Owen to serve as his squire. Then he had only agreed because something in Owen’s stubborn spirit—his wild courage in the face of odds that would daunt anyone else and his insistence that justice be done (even if that meant being the only page who had ever dared to accuse Wyldon of unfairness that day Mindelan had rallied her group against bandits and Wyldon could only comment on her weak stomach for blood)—reminded him of himself or at least the image he liked to have of himself as a knight. 

He would have to teach the boy when to hold his tongue—he wasn’t deliberately impertinent like Queenscove, but he could still be obliviously offensive, a trait that only became more more unacceptable with age—but at least the lad was rough around the edges of his fundamental goodness rather than polished in his evil as Joren had been. Wyldon had been blinded by Joren’s skills on the practice court and ignored his bullying brutality. He could atone for some of the damage he had done by ensuring that Owen benefited from the more intense, focused instruction he could provide as a knightmaster so Owen be better prepared to serve the Crown upon his knighthood. 

Owen with his bravery and resolve to stand up for what was right could grow into a knight who would make Wyldon proud if Wyldon could teach him when he should speak when others wouldn’t and when he shouldn’t. With that in mind, he added his best advice against babbling, “You may have as many thoughts as you wish in your head at a time, but don’t try to express them all at once. Your words will end up jumbled if you try to speak more than one idea in the same breath.” 

“Yes, sir.” Owen slid the blackened bacon from his stick onto a tin plate, grimacing whether at Wyldon’s words or because the bacon burned his fingers, Wyldon couldn’t be certain. “I wasn’t trying to babble. I know you dislike me since I babble.” 

“I dislike your babble,” Wyldon corrected, observing with inward exasperation that the boy likely hadn’t noticed he was again guilty of babbling. Then, since he had always been his most forthright with his squires by flickering firelight that shadowed any emotion his features might reveal, he finished with the first hint of affection he had ever shown Owen, “I don’t dislike you.” 

“You don’t?” Owen had bitten into his bacon, a fact repulsively demonstrated when he gaped at Wyldon with a mouth overflowing with partially chewed meat. 

“I don’t, but I do dislike you talking with your mouth full of food.” Wyldon remembered that Owen’s mother (Black God bring her soul peace) had been slain in a bandit attack before she could have hammered table manners into her son’s head, but Wyldon believed that the negligence the Lord of Jesslaw, who sequestered himself in his castle and never came to court, displayed in raising his heir with a poorer understanding of etiquette than many unlettered peasants. A noble father had a solemn duty to prevent his children from embarrassing themselves in polite society. Apparently, Wyldon would be forced into fulfilling that obligation to Owen, another responsibility he had assumed when he had extended the offer to serve as his squire to Owen. Gruffly, he grunted, “I see I’m going to have to teach you when to keep your mouth shut. One such time when you’re expected to keep your mouth closed is when it’s busy chewing food. Nobody wants a view of your meal after it’s passed your lips.” 

“Yes, sir. I swallowed before speaking this time.” Owen had indeed done so, which Wyldon chose to interpret as an encouraging omen that the lad could learn. 

“I hope you don’t expect me to praise you for that.” Wyldon scratched at the scars on his arm that were evidence of a hurrock’s savaging it when he had rescued the younger royal children so many years ago when he could never have envisioned his students failing their Ordeals. 

“Yes, my lord. I don’t expect you’ll praise me for anything at all.” Owen sounded cheery and cheeky, all the proof Wyldon would ever need that by this firelight they had settled into the unmistakable but undefinable rhythm of their knightmaster-squire relationship. 

“That’s just as well because with that attitude”—Wyldon was grateful for the firelight that concealed his crooked grin—“I don’t expect I’ll be praising you at all, Jesslaw.”


End file.
